Monday, September 25, 2006

Cooperation ? Not with Debian...

I learned how "nice" it is to be "Free" at any price. Firefox, my favorite browser is Open Source. A great amount of effort was spent in making Firefox popular; advertisements in the New York Times covering a whole page.. The marketing of Firefox is truly one of the success stories of the Open Source world. Firefox is a trademark, it has a slick logo and the Mozilla Foundation protects its assets.

The Debian distribution is one of those "Free" distributions that does not appreciate that derivations of logos are not permitted. As it does not allow these files in it's distribution. Firefox insists that the logo and the name go together.. this results in a mess where Debian is likely to rename Firefox..

In my mind this is foolishness. Logos and trademarks are there to help products like Firefox to create a market. The evident denial IMHO of this is as stupid as the Wikimedia Foundation only having it's logos in the Commons repository and denying the logos of other organizations.

It is much better to appreciate that logos have a special place and, that it is great when organizations allow the use of their logo to be used with encyclopedic content.. For now is not to be because it is considered not to be "Free".. in effect denying this Freedom to others that is reserved for the own organization. It is not consistent .. it is a muddle.. It is bad practice.

Thanks,
GerardM

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